Yesterday we had a meeting of the education and outreach team for the project, led by Professor Choi Young Ai, Hanyong's oldest friend, and the reason that all of this is happening. At one point she asked me the main thrust of the play in one sentence. There was a short pause, and then a lot of sentences, and then an apology! But actually in the course of the meeting, we did get closer to a full picture of what we think the real strengths of the piece are. It is genuinely unusual, and it is hard, both to pin down, and indeed to produce, but we all agreed that reading the script gives a strong sense of what is going on in the minds and hearts of two young people, at the beginning of adolescence, faced with changing bodies, and a world which seems to them to miss the point.
The central metaphor of the play is of a sense of being cast adrift, on blocks of ice, already precarious and now melting. Those blocks of ice can collide with others and gain strength or crack. they can spin, slide or sink, and there is a sense of being driven by forces which can not be controlled. The noble loving but endangered polar bear that is cast adrift in this way, arrives finally at land. But the journey then is only just beginning. There is something about this way of looking at a time in life that could only have emerged from the process that it has come from - to me it feels a very korean idea, but there is nothing uniquely korean about the feelings it portrays, and the teenagers that voiced those feelings were in Birmingham and Seoul in equal numbers. Their voices are there in the text - our challenge is to make them heard from the stage too.
We have been once through the play very roughly, identifying themes, key points and words, and looking at some of the ways we might stage each scene. We are on the second more detailed round now, and led by Shin Dong we are looking to make the decisions he needs to finalise design elements. The meeting for design staff is tomorrow afternoon, so we will hope to be at that point by then. Tonight we finally had or 'beginning' party, in a beer and fried chicken place right next tio the NTCK. Spirits were high. The plot thickens. Our ice cube is still afloat.